7 ms·

Paint.net 5.2 alpha now runs on Linux

206 points by judah 29d ago

3836293648 1mo ago
Yes! This is by far the number one program I've missed since I left Windows years ago. GIMP is so unfriendly, krita is for drawing, pinta is a very shallow clone that only just stopped crashing a few months ago. Paint.net is just better in every way.
newsre4der 1mo ago
Sounds good, but why a .Net app can't work with .NET 10? Does it use Windows-only features?
- LarsKrimi 1mo ago
  It uses Direct2D which most of the post is about. They added the support by slopping a Direct2D emulation layer together.
RunSet 1mo ago
Paint.net was originally MIT licensed but the author closed its source because people did not give him credit. Note: The MIT license does not require credit. https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of-%E2%80%9Cbackspaceware%E2%80%9D/ https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of... Paint.net likely still benefits from the announcement of "Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Paint" long after switching to a proprietary license, which I find more dubious than using MIT-licensed code without giving credit to the author. Also I rather doubt a "clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D" can be "written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible"?
- alberto-m 1mo ago
  > Note: The MIT license does not require credit. The MIT notice starts with “Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>”, and who uses the code must include that line in any derived work. > Also I rather doubt Do you doubt Claude's rewrite can be defined as “clean room” (I also do)? Or that Claude is able to rewrite it? Or that it would not have been possible otherwise?
- eviks 29d ago
  > The MIT license does not require credit. Actually, credit is the ONLY thing that license requires
nashashmi 29d ago
Paint.net used to be an open source collaboration project by Rick Brewster, a Microsoft Employee and the students at the University of Washington. Today it is a private closed source project accepting donations, and still headed by Rick Brewster.
- gguingff 29d ago
  Don't forget that it actively spies on the user! Say no to telemetry.
- vunderba 29d ago
  I guess more digital art options on Linux are always good, but that aside, is there even a good reason to use it when something like Krita exists? It's always worked flawlessly on my linux machine (Mint). https://github.com/kde/krita https://github.com/kde/krita
  - nashashmi 29d ago
    I'd reverse the question and ask is there any reason to continue developing in .NET and windows-only languages when windows allows for WSL apps.
    - encrypted_bird 29d ago
      Paint.NET has a *lot* of legacy code that cannot just be discarded. The dev said as much in their original post.
    - timanderson 29d ago
      .NET is not a windows-only language. Actually .NET is not a language, C# is a language. I am currently working on a .NET GUI application for macOS.
  - orbital-decay 29d ago
    Very different software. Paint.NET is mostly a composition/annotation tool oriented towards simplicity and speed, Krita revolves around digital painting.
yodon 29d ago
This is via Wine, so presumably it should also run on Macs now. Paint.net is the only thing I miss from my days on Windows machines, so super excited about this!
- fletchowns 29d ago
  I also miss paint.net on Mac. Pinta gets pretty close though: https://www.pinta-project.com/ https://www.pinta-project.com/
judah 29d ago
The full thread[0] about how it runs on Wine is quite interesting: > Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE (triggered by using /wine). It lives in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened. > Most of this code is, as they say, "vibe coded." By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it's more "trust me bro" style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it's just way way way too much. For reference, the rest of Paint.NET is about 700,000 lines of code and I've been working on it for over 20 years. I did thoroughly review any code that had to be changed or added elsewhere in the Paint.NET code base (refactoring and integration points, etc.). Over time I do hope that more of this code will be vetted by real humans and also by more advanced AI models. [0]: https://forums.paint.net/topic/134563-%F0%9F%8D%B7-extremely-experimental-winelinux-support-how-to-get-started/ https://forums.paint.net/topic/134563-%F0%9F%8D%B7-extremely...
- 0x1d7 29d ago
  How can one claim clean room if developed by a model? “Don’t use stolen code, yo”?
  - rspeele 29d ago
    I'm not the Paint.NET developer (just a happy user of that software), but to me the moral logic would go something like this: If Anthropic can absorb proprietary or GPL code into their models, which they rent usage of for tens of billions of dollars in revenue, and successfully claim that this violates no licenses, then I can also consider the output of those models "clean" for purposes of my software I give away for free.
- edflsafoiewq 29d ago
  Why is Direct2D so hard to implement in Wine?
joshuaissac 29d ago
I see they finally got the domain name paint.net. They used to be at getpaint.net, and the paint company that owned paint.net had a link saying something like 'if you are looking for the graphics software, go to getpaint.net'.
- aiiotnoodle 29d ago
  As someone who went to paint.net as a child this is great news!
- devindotcom 29d ago
  the number of times i did this! good for them.
- RestartKernel 29d ago
  The previous owner of the Paint.net domain erred in hosting information regarding Paint.NET, which was evidently misleading enough to win dotPDN LLC a domain squatting suit.
  - joshuaissac 28d ago
    > The previous owner of the Paint.net domain erred in hosting information regarding Paint.NET The ones who had displayed a link to getpaint.net was a legitimate paint company. Some time after 2012, the domain name was acquired by another entity (associated with a "domain investor"), which allegedly turned the website into an imitation of getpaint.net in 2025, allowing the developer to file a successful lawsuit based on trademark infringement. https://alldomains.app/paint-net-after-22-years-software-developer-got-domain-using-litigation/ https://alldomains.app/paint-net-after-22-years-software-dev...
tech234a 29d ago
Apparently the author got a surprising amount of backlash on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4pheo22g https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
- embedding-shape 29d ago
  > Alright everyone, message received. I was not expecting this response, I honestly had no idea before I made the post The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about? People don't like .net software running on Linux? > Like I said, the code is experimental. A proof of concept showing that PDN-on-WINE is possible. It's not finished. I can literally just delete it. It won't be part of the next build. This almost sounds like sarcasm and a reference to the whole "The Bun-rewritten-in-Rust branch is just a prototype and probably means nothing" Tweet that initially made the frontpage when it. But I think it's in earnest, just very similar to how I remember that Tweet I suppose.
  - haunter 29d ago
    >The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about? It's Bluesky, they hate AI so the mob bullied him to delete the posts https://web.archive.org/web/20260901203707/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tx5mvosoyunwonvwsqs2m2g5/post/3mughvs4yf22n https://web.archive.org/web/20260901203707/https://bsky.app/... >Paint .NET-on-WINE has never been possible because of Direct2D, which WINE has really struggled with (for good reasons). >So like ... why not reimplement Direct2D-in-Paint .NET? Remove the dependency on WINE completely. Clean room reverse engineering ... >Thanks to Claude Code, it's now a reality. More story in the link above. >It's buggy and slow, but real progress is being made. >And I have no idea when/if this will be "production ready" or "supported" or even "good enough." Maybe next year, maybe next month, maybe 2035. >Claude made more progress on this in 3 weeks than we've seen in the 12 years since PDN started using Direct2D in 2014. >This isn't to talk down to the WINE folks, btw. Direct2D has a really complicated effects system, and probably only PDN really uses it, so the ROI was very low. >AI doesn't care. And it doesn't get tired. And this is the perfect task for it: it already has the design (D2D's docs and API), and it already has a known-good implementation of it and an app to test against and bang its head against. >So that's what it did: it banged its head against d2d1.dll and paintdotnet.exe for about 3 weeks until it was able to boot up PDN. In WINE. For real. >Here's PDN on .NET 10 win-x64, in WINE 11.14-dev, on Ubuntu, in WSL2, on Windows 11. And yes it works on real Linux too.
rietta 29d ago
Hugged to death? website is not working for me from the xfinity network.
JamesCoyne 29d ago
Unlikely to see wide distribution on Linux given the license
- charcircuit 29d ago
  The license allows redistribution so I don't think it would be prohibitive to it being distributed.
  - gertop 29d ago
    Paint.net itself is still not open-source, so no distro will distribute it. If this shin even becomes "good enough" then I'm sure it will appear in the AUR and flathhub, however.
    - sneak 29d ago
      Lots of distros distribute nonfree software.
haunter 29d ago
Here is the source code of the last open source (MIT) release from 2008 Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux https://web.archive.org/web/20080000000000*/http://www.dotpdn.com/files/pdn_src_3_36.7z https://web.archive.org/web/20080000000000*/http://www.dotpd...
- embedding-shape 29d ago
  > Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux I think the question nowadays would be "What's the least amount of tokens I could use for making this build on modern Linux?", with any amount of tokens, there isn't much you couldn't do with enough time.
  - seki285 29d ago
    No, the question is "Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux" not "Wonder how much slop I can generate".
    - embedding-shape 29d ago
      > No, the question is "Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux" But of course it can, anything is doable with enough time and resources.
- gertop 29d ago
  Pinta is the continuation of this source, it already exists.
  - Macha 29d ago
    Note Pinta was only ever a port of the engine, Pinta's UI is a from-scratch Gtk# clone. Given the compelling reason to use Paint.NET was arguably the UI, that's a pretty big drawback.
    - mminer237 29d ago
      The UI is pretty similar. It's very intuitive for someone used to Paint.NET. Pinta definitely satisfies my desire for Paint.NET on Linux.
thataccount 29d ago
Wine is not the same as "runs on Linux". Able to be run on Linux with wine, sure.
- tiltowait 29d ago
  This feels like a distinction without a difference. Would you say a Python script/Java utility doesn't "run on Linux" because you need Python/Java installed?
  - gertop 29d ago
    Programs running under wine don't have the same level of system/desktop integration as native programs, it's a very important distinction.
    - Analemma_ 29d ago
      You still haven't explained how this is different from Python or Java applications.
      - dombiscoff 29d ago
        Semantically you wouldn't, because they require their specific run-times. The difference is that those run-times are built to work natively on Linux (and often are enmeshed within its distributions), whereas any software requiring WINE is built to natively work on Windows, but is able to be translated for Linux. That distinction, between a native built runtime and a translation layer, is pretty major, and I think is why you can argue the colloquial usage of the term 'runs on Linux' differs between the two.
    - deleted 29d ago
      [deleted]
anttiharju 29d ago
paint.net is amazing for basic png editing, I've dreamed of this day. It'a the only thing I miss from Windows. I don't understand the slashback at all.
VCFundedGenYer 29d ago
It is very buggy, was AI slop coded, and barely works. This is not a good release. Don't support poorly made software. Use Gimp, Pinta, or Krita on Linux.
xnx 29d ago
I didn't realize Paint.net was closed-source now. What's the best alternative, Pinta?
- Macha 29d ago
  Paint.Net was only really open source entirely from 2004-2007 and partially from 2007-2009 (engine only, not the UI for the latter part). My experience: Pinta is an inferior Paint.NET . It's about the same level of complexity, but everything is just like... 60-85% as good. Krita is a heavier program, but has a similar level of polish. You might not use half the features, but Krita's what I'd suggest for anyone wanting an open source alternative to Paint.net
- tech234a 29d ago
  It's been closed source for 16+ years. Some background: * https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of-%E2%80%9Cbackspaceware%E2%80%9D/ https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of... * https://blog.paint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet-v35/ https://blog.paint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet...
  - vova_hn2 29d ago
    > The biggest problem was that, even though these were clearly unethical and deplorable actions, the MIT License permitted all of it. Seriously? Why not go GPL then?
    - NetMageSCW 29d ago
      Because that is even worse for what he wants to allow.
      - saghm 29d ago
        Which is what, exactly? As far as I can tell, it seems more about what he wants to not allow. At the end of the day I respect an author's choice whether to close source to something even if I disagree with it, but it feels a little euphemistic to describe that as "allowing" something.
redox99 29d ago
How much in tokens/Claude subs would it cost to make a paint.net open source clone? Seems like the kind of software that with enough tokens an agent would be able to create from scratch autonomously (because you have a clear goal and reference) I'd guess with 5 max subs running fable 5.1 almost non stop it should be doable in a couple of weeks.
- jadar 29d ago
  The author says it's about 700k LoC that he's worked on for 20 years.[1] I don't know how many tokens that arrives at, but that seems non-trivial. [1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/rick-brewster/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/rick-brewster/
  - redox99 29d ago
    700k LoC of human written code is probably like 2M LoC of LLM "slop". That's probably around 8M tokens. Assuming a single fable agent that one shots the new source code at 30 tok/s, that's 74 hours. Of course it needs wayyy more tokens because it wouldn't one shot it, plus the reasoning tokens. Generation speed would be faster because you'd have many simultaneous agents though. Bun rewrite took 6 days of coding and was a similar number of LoC, so I think a couple of weeks is definitely reasonable, although you probably need more than 5 Claude subs.
    - solid_fuel 29d ago
      > Bun rewrite took 6 days of coding and was a similar number of LoC, so I think a couple of weeks is definitely reasonable, although you probably need more than 5 Claude subs. Bun had numerous standardized and extensive javascript test suites to validate the slop code against. I doubt paint.net has test coverage anywhere near that complete, and without it using LLMs to rewrite something is a much larger risk. Besides which, Bun claims the rewrite took 6 days but they took months after that to finish hammering out the bugs and actually ship, so I don't really buy the original price tag or timeline on their rewrite.
hulitu 29d ago
> and EXTREMELY experimental support for running on WINE/Linux. So it needs Wine.
mythz 29d ago
It's nice to have more options, so far I've managed to handle most of my Linux graphics needs with https://www.photopea.com https://www.photopea.com - amazing broad support of document image formats, full-featured edits and all running in the browser.
alampy 29d ago
[dead]
tkot 29d ago
I know nothing about writing an image editor or graphics programming but maybe someone here can fill me in - would it be more or less difficult ("would it take more or less tokens" is probably the right question to ask these days) to replace the Windows-specific APIs with cross-platform alternatives (I guess Skia instead of Direct2D and something like Avalonia or Uno instead of Win32-based UI?) instead of re-implementing Direct2D?
- sandreas 29d ago
  Seems that it is doable: https://github.com/PixiEditor/PixiEditor https://github.com/PixiEditor/PixiEditor However, I think without having the burden of legacy code and APIs it is a bit easier to accomplish. Probably paint.net has been targeting Windows platforms from the beginning and making it "Linux compatible" has not been a big effort but more a side effect of fixing some stuff and wine generally being awesome. I personally would love to see commercial editors like Affinity Studio targeting Linux. While solutions like Krita and Gimp are great, it did not really click for me. I'm using Gimp, but somehow I often find myself seeking for how to do easy tasks that should be more intuitive.
  - tkot 29d ago
    Wow, PixiEditor looks really cool.
- deleted 29d ago
  [deleted]
jijji 29d ago
wow if the paint.net people are trying to win an award for most popup advertising on one web page, they have my vote!
llm_hal_9000 29d ago
This seems fun. I like Paint.net. Will try it out when its finished. I understand the backlash against LLM stuff and have my own reasons for not liking it that much. If its disclosed though, I don't mind. The rest of this comment is claude wondering why I have not run into that much LLM assisted software and games. I've been trying to find at least partially LLM made software, software features, and games to try that's not a chatbot/agent/harness/mcp server for well over a year now. So far I'm up to one library, one piece of software (Trilium Notes), and zero games I'm using on a weekly basis. I almost had a file browser, but they stopped working on it and it was not working well with Windows DPI scaling. Found one okay song, but it had that cheap LLM feeling. I do see a lot of LLM generated memes of influencers. I keep thinking I should be finding lots of software and games to try out. Ports, clones in various languages, decomplications, feature additions from people that did not have enough time to work on them by hand, that sort of thing. Only four out of 50ish games on my wishlist (mostly small teams or solo devs) have AI disclosures. AI seems to be used most often for texture and icon placeholders, voice acting (sometimes to be redone with real actors), translations, icons, and signs in-game. Two games had to state that they are using other systems besides LLMs for their AI features. When I do find projects, I still run into the same pain points I did as before. Namely being too slow to load, DPI scaling issues, general errors so the software does not run, and most often the instructions as listed don't work but you can still get the software to run if ask the LLM that generated the software how to run it because the instructions LLM generated did not work for you. I'm assuming there is a lot of AI stuff going on the in background and backends of SaaS products and websites I use but who knows.
SilentM68 29d ago
That's awesome news. Many good free apps that run on Win/MacOS should be ported to Linux.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 29d ago
Oh god YES! I paid for paint.net on Windows because it's the only software I find reasonably simple AND reasonably advanced, covering all my usage. The lack of a linux version was a huge disappointment, especially since most of my computers are switching to windows (I have 2 more on windows and was evaluating moving one of the two over!)
eviks 29d ago
By the way, had the cheerful vibe coded attitude spilled much into the main codebase or is it only contained in the new platform?
reverseblade2 29d ago
But does it support AI and mcp? Was just kidding.
deleted 29d ago
[deleted]
jokoon 28d ago
That was the last software that held me to windows I hope plugin makers are going to port them too
Wavesonics 28d ago
Ha, I was just searching to see how I could run it on linux, NICE!

206 points by judah 29d ago

Yes! This is by far the number one program I've missed since I left Windows years ago. GIMP is so unfriendly, krita is for drawing, pinta is a very shallow clone that only just stopped crashing a few months ago. Paint.net is just better in every way.

newsre4der 1mo ago

Sounds good, but why a .Net app can't work with .NET 10? Does it use Windows-only features?

LarsKrimi 1mo ago
It uses Direct2D which most of the post is about. They added the support by slopping a Direct2D emulation layer together.

RunSet 1mo ago

Paint.net was originally MIT licensed but the author closed its source because people did not give him credit. Note: The MIT license does not require credit. https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of-%E2%80%9Cbackspaceware%E2%80%9D/ https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of... Paint.net likely still benefits from the announcement of "Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Paint" long after switching to a proprietary license, which I find more dubious than using MIT-licensed code without giving credit to the author. Also I rather doubt a "clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D" can be "written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible"?

alberto-m 1mo ago
> Note: The MIT license does not require credit. The MIT notice starts with “Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>”, and who uses the code must include that line in any derived work. > Also I rather doubt Do you doubt Claude's rewrite can be defined as “clean room” (I also do)? Or that Claude is able to rewrite it? Or that it would not have been possible otherwise?
eviks 29d ago
> The MIT license does not require credit. Actually, credit is the ONLY thing that license requires

nashashmi 29d ago

Paint.net used to be an open source collaboration project by Rick Brewster, a Microsoft Employee and the students at the University of Washington. Today it is a private closed source project accepting donations, and still headed by Rick Brewster.

gguingff 29d ago
Don't forget that it actively spies on the user! Say no to telemetry.
vunderba 29d ago
I guess more digital art options on Linux are always good, but that aside, is there even a good reason to use it when something like Krita exists? It's always worked flawlessly on my linux machine (Mint). https://github.com/kde/krita https://github.com/kde/krita
- nashashmi 29d ago
  I'd reverse the question and ask is there any reason to continue developing in .NET and windows-only languages when windows allows for WSL apps.
  - encrypted_bird 29d ago
    Paint.NET has a *lot* of legacy code that cannot just be discarded. The dev said as much in their original post.
  - timanderson 29d ago
    .NET is not a windows-only language. Actually .NET is not a language, C# is a language. I am currently working on a .NET GUI application for macOS.
- orbital-decay 29d ago
  Very different software. Paint.NET is mostly a composition/annotation tool oriented towards simplicity and speed, Krita revolves around digital painting.

yodon 29d ago

This is via Wine, so presumably it should also run on Macs now. Paint.net is the only thing I miss from my days on Windows machines, so super excited about this!

fletchowns 29d ago
I also miss paint.net on Mac. Pinta gets pretty close though: https://www.pinta-project.com/ https://www.pinta-project.com/

judah 29d ago

The full thread[0] about how it runs on Wine is quite interesting: > Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE (triggered by using /wine). It lives in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened. > Most of this code is, as they say, "vibe coded." By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it's more "trust me bro" style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it's just way way way too much. For reference, the rest of Paint.NET is about 700,000 lines of code and I've been working on it for over 20 years. I did thoroughly review any code that had to be changed or added elsewhere in the Paint.NET code base (refactoring and integration points, etc.). Over time I do hope that more of this code will be vetted by real humans and also by more advanced AI models. [0]: https://forums.paint.net/topic/134563-%F0%9F%8D%B7-extremely-experimental-winelinux-support-how-to-get-started/ https://forums.paint.net/topic/134563-%F0%9F%8D%B7-extremely...

0x1d7 29d ago
How can one claim clean room if developed by a model? “Don’t use stolen code, yo”?
- rspeele 29d ago
  I'm not the Paint.NET developer (just a happy user of that software), but to me the moral logic would go something like this: If Anthropic can absorb proprietary or GPL code into their models, which they rent usage of for tens of billions of dollars in revenue, and successfully claim that this violates no licenses, then I can also consider the output of those models "clean" for purposes of my software I give away for free.
edflsafoiewq 29d ago
Why is Direct2D so hard to implement in Wine?

joshuaissac 29d ago

I see they finally got the domain name paint.net. They used to be at getpaint.net, and the paint company that owned paint.net had a link saying something like 'if you are looking for the graphics software, go to getpaint.net'.

aiiotnoodle 29d ago
As someone who went to paint.net as a child this is great news!
devindotcom 29d ago
the number of times i did this! good for them.
RestartKernel 29d ago
The previous owner of the Paint.net domain erred in hosting information regarding Paint.NET, which was evidently misleading enough to win dotPDN LLC a domain squatting suit.
- joshuaissac 28d ago
  > The previous owner of the Paint.net domain erred in hosting information regarding Paint.NET The ones who had displayed a link to getpaint.net was a legitimate paint company. Some time after 2012, the domain name was acquired by another entity (associated with a "domain investor"), which allegedly turned the website into an imitation of getpaint.net in 2025, allowing the developer to file a successful lawsuit based on trademark infringement. https://alldomains.app/paint-net-after-22-years-software-developer-got-domain-using-litigation/ https://alldomains.app/paint-net-after-22-years-software-dev...

tech234a 29d ago

Apparently the author got a surprising amount of backlash on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4pheo22g https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...

embedding-shape 29d ago
> Alright everyone, message received. I was not expecting this response, I honestly had no idea before I made the post The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about? People don't like .net software running on Linux? > Like I said, the code is experimental. A proof of concept showing that PDN-on-WINE is possible. It's not finished. I can literally just delete it. It won't be part of the next build. This almost sounds like sarcasm and a reference to the whole "The Bun-rewritten-in-Rust branch is just a prototype and probably means nothing" Tweet that initially made the frontpage when it. But I think it's in earnest, just very similar to how I remember that Tweet I suppose.
- haunter 29d ago
  >The source got deleted, what is the backlash even about? It's Bluesky, they hate AI so the mob bullied him to delete the posts https://web.archive.org/web/20260901203707/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tx5mvosoyunwonvwsqs2m2g5/post/3mughvs4yf22n https://web.archive.org/web/20260901203707/https://bsky.app/... >Paint .NET-on-WINE has never been possible because of Direct2D, which WINE has really struggled with (for good reasons). >So like ... why not reimplement Direct2D-in-Paint .NET? Remove the dependency on WINE completely. Clean room reverse engineering ... >Thanks to Claude Code, it's now a reality. More story in the link above. >It's buggy and slow, but real progress is being made. >And I have no idea when/if this will be "production ready" or "supported" or even "good enough." Maybe next year, maybe next month, maybe 2035. >Claude made more progress on this in 3 weeks than we've seen in the 12 years since PDN started using Direct2D in 2014. >This isn't to talk down to the WINE folks, btw. Direct2D has a really complicated effects system, and probably only PDN really uses it, so the ROI was very low. >AI doesn't care. And it doesn't get tired. And this is the perfect task for it: it already has the design (D2D's docs and API), and it already has a known-good implementation of it and an app to test against and bang its head against. >So that's what it did: it banged its head against d2d1.dll and paintdotnet.exe for about 3 weeks until it was able to boot up PDN. In WINE. For real. >Here's PDN on .NET 10 win-x64, in WINE 11.14-dev, on Ubuntu, in WSL2, on Windows 11. And yes it works on real Linux too.

rietta 29d ago

Hugged to death? website is not working for me from the xfinity network.

JamesCoyne 29d ago

Unlikely to see wide distribution on Linux given the license

charcircuit 29d ago
The license allows redistribution so I don't think it would be prohibitive to it being distributed.
- gertop 29d ago
  Paint.net itself is still not open-source, so no distro will distribute it. If this shin even becomes "good enough" then I'm sure it will appear in the AUR and flathhub, however.
  - sneak 29d ago
    Lots of distros distribute nonfree software.

haunter 29d ago

Here is the source code of the last open source (MIT) release from 2008 Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux https://web.archive.org/web/20080000000000*/http://www.dotpdn.com/files/pdn_src_3_36.7z https://web.archive.org/web/20080000000000*/http://www.dotpd...

embedding-shape 29d ago
> Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux I think the question nowadays would be "What's the least amount of tokens I could use for making this build on modern Linux?", with any amount of tokens, there isn't much you couldn't do with enough time.
- seki285 29d ago
  No, the question is "Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux" not "Wonder how much slop I can generate".
  - embedding-shape 29d ago
    > No, the question is "Wonder if it can be built for modern Linux" But of course it can, anything is doable with enough time and resources.
gertop 29d ago
Pinta is the continuation of this source, it already exists.
- Macha 29d ago
  Note Pinta was only ever a port of the engine, Pinta's UI is a from-scratch Gtk# clone. Given the compelling reason to use Paint.NET was arguably the UI, that's a pretty big drawback.
  - mminer237 29d ago
    The UI is pretty similar. It's very intuitive for someone used to Paint.NET. Pinta definitely satisfies my desire for Paint.NET on Linux.

thataccount 29d ago

Wine is not the same as "runs on Linux". Able to be run on Linux with wine, sure.

tiltowait 29d ago
This feels like a distinction without a difference. Would you say a Python script/Java utility doesn't "run on Linux" because you need Python/Java installed?
- gertop 29d ago
  Programs running under wine don't have the same level of system/desktop integration as native programs, it's a very important distinction.
  - Analemma_ 29d ago
    You still haven't explained how this is different from Python or Java applications.
    - dombiscoff 29d ago
      Semantically you wouldn't, because they require their specific run-times. The difference is that those run-times are built to work natively on Linux (and often are enmeshed within its distributions), whereas any software requiring WINE is built to natively work on Windows, but is able to be translated for Linux. That distinction, between a native built runtime and a translation layer, is pretty major, and I think is why you can argue the colloquial usage of the term 'runs on Linux' differs between the two.
  - deleted 29d ago
    [deleted]

anttiharju 29d ago

paint.net is amazing for basic png editing, I've dreamed of this day. It'a the only thing I miss from Windows. I don't understand the slashback at all.

VCFundedGenYer 29d ago

It is very buggy, was AI slop coded, and barely works. This is not a good release. Don't support poorly made software. Use Gimp, Pinta, or Krita on Linux.

xnx 29d ago

I didn't realize Paint.net was closed-source now. What's the best alternative, Pinta?

Macha 29d ago
Paint.Net was only really open source entirely from 2004-2007 and partially from 2007-2009 (engine only, not the UI for the latter part). My experience: Pinta is an inferior Paint.NET . It's about the same level of complexity, but everything is just like... 60-85% as good. Krita is a heavier program, but has a similar level of polish. You might not use half the features, but Krita's what I'd suggest for anyone wanting an open source alternative to Paint.net
tech234a 29d ago
It's been closed source for 16+ years. Some background: * https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of-%E2%80%9Cbackspaceware%E2%80%9D/ https://blog.paint.net/2007/12/04/freeware-authors-beware-of... * https://blog.paint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet-v35/ https://blog.paint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paintnet...
- vova_hn2 29d ago
  > The biggest problem was that, even though these were clearly unethical and deplorable actions, the MIT License permitted all of it. Seriously? Why not go GPL then?
  - NetMageSCW 29d ago
    Because that is even worse for what he wants to allow.
    - saghm 29d ago
      Which is what, exactly? As far as I can tell, it seems more about what he wants to not allow. At the end of the day I respect an author's choice whether to close source to something even if I disagree with it, but it feels a little euphemistic to describe that as "allowing" something.

redox99 29d ago

How much in tokens/Claude subs would it cost to make a paint.net open source clone? Seems like the kind of software that with enough tokens an agent would be able to create from scratch autonomously (because you have a clear goal and reference) I'd guess with 5 max subs running fable 5.1 almost non stop it should be doable in a couple of weeks.

jadar 29d ago
The author says it's about 700k LoC that he's worked on for 20 years.[1] I don't know how many tokens that arrives at, but that seems non-trivial. [1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/rick-brewster/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/rick-brewster/
- redox99 29d ago
  700k LoC of human written code is probably like 2M LoC of LLM "slop". That's probably around 8M tokens. Assuming a single fable agent that one shots the new source code at 30 tok/s, that's 74 hours. Of course it needs wayyy more tokens because it wouldn't one shot it, plus the reasoning tokens. Generation speed would be faster because you'd have many simultaneous agents though. Bun rewrite took 6 days of coding and was a similar number of LoC, so I think a couple of weeks is definitely reasonable, although you probably need more than 5 Claude subs.
  - solid_fuel 29d ago
    > Bun rewrite took 6 days of coding and was a similar number of LoC, so I think a couple of weeks is definitely reasonable, although you probably need more than 5 Claude subs. Bun had numerous standardized and extensive javascript test suites to validate the slop code against. I doubt paint.net has test coverage anywhere near that complete, and without it using LLMs to rewrite something is a much larger risk. Besides which, Bun claims the rewrite took 6 days but they took months after that to finish hammering out the bugs and actually ship, so I don't really buy the original price tag or timeline on their rewrite.

hulitu 29d ago

> and EXTREMELY experimental support for running on WINE/Linux. So it needs Wine.

mythz 29d ago

It's nice to have more options, so far I've managed to handle most of my Linux graphics needs with https://www.photopea.com https://www.photopea.com - amazing broad support of document image formats, full-featured edits and all running in the browser.

alampy 29d ago

[dead]

tkot 29d ago

I know nothing about writing an image editor or graphics programming but maybe someone here can fill me in - would it be more or less difficult ("would it take more or less tokens" is probably the right question to ask these days) to replace the Windows-specific APIs with cross-platform alternatives (I guess Skia instead of Direct2D and something like Avalonia or Uno instead of Win32-based UI?) instead of re-implementing Direct2D?

sandreas 29d ago
Seems that it is doable: https://github.com/PixiEditor/PixiEditor https://github.com/PixiEditor/PixiEditor However, I think without having the burden of legacy code and APIs it is a bit easier to accomplish. Probably paint.net has been targeting Windows platforms from the beginning and making it "Linux compatible" has not been a big effort but more a side effect of fixing some stuff and wine generally being awesome. I personally would love to see commercial editors like Affinity Studio targeting Linux. While solutions like Krita and Gimp are great, it did not really click for me. I'm using Gimp, but somehow I often find myself seeking for how to do easy tasks that should be more intuitive.
- tkot 29d ago
  Wow, PixiEditor looks really cool.
deleted 29d ago
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jijji 29d ago

wow if the paint.net people are trying to win an award for most popup advertising on one web page, they have my vote!

llm_hal_9000 29d ago

This seems fun. I like Paint.net. Will try it out when its finished. I understand the backlash against LLM stuff and have my own reasons for not liking it that much. If its disclosed though, I don't mind. The rest of this comment is claude wondering why I have not run into that much LLM assisted software and games. I've been trying to find at least partially LLM made software, software features, and games to try that's not a chatbot/agent/harness/mcp server for well over a year now. So far I'm up to one library, one piece of software (Trilium Notes), and zero games I'm using on a weekly basis. I almost had a file browser, but they stopped working on it and it was not working well with Windows DPI scaling. Found one okay song, but it had that cheap LLM feeling. I do see a lot of LLM generated memes of influencers. I keep thinking I should be finding lots of software and games to try out. Ports, clones in various languages, decomplications, feature additions from people that did not have enough time to work on them by hand, that sort of thing. Only four out of 50ish games on my wishlist (mostly small teams or solo devs) have AI disclosures. AI seems to be used most often for texture and icon placeholders, voice acting (sometimes to be redone with real actors), translations, icons, and signs in-game. Two games had to state that they are using other systems besides LLMs for their AI features. When I do find projects, I still run into the same pain points I did as before. Namely being too slow to load, DPI scaling issues, general errors so the software does not run, and most often the instructions as listed don't work but you can still get the software to run if ask the LLM that generated the software how to run it because the instructions LLM generated did not work for you. I'm assuming there is a lot of AI stuff going on the in background and backends of SaaS products and websites I use but who knows.

SilentM68 29d ago

That's awesome news. Many good free apps that run on Win/MacOS should be ported to Linux.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 29d ago

Oh god YES! I paid for paint.net on Windows because it's the only software I find reasonably simple AND reasonably advanced, covering all my usage. The lack of a linux version was a huge disappointment, especially since most of my computers are switching to windows (I have 2 more on windows and was evaluating moving one of the two over!)

eviks 29d ago

By the way, had the cheerful vibe coded attitude spilled much into the main codebase or is it only contained in the new platform?

reverseblade2 29d ago

But does it support AI and mcp? Was just kidding.

deleted 29d ago

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jokoon 28d ago

That was the last software that held me to windows I hope plugin makers are going to port them too

Wavesonics 28d ago

Ha, I was just searching to see how I could run it on linux, NICE!